Worst Week Ever!: July 10-16

Billionaire businessman Charles Koch has a
pretty good understanding of what people say about him on social media
for an old guy who probably doesn’t use Twitter (and sucks). During an
interview with the Wichita Eagle today, Koch described how
critics called him names after he spent millions of dollars during the
2012 presidential campaign opposing Barack Obama and progressive causes;
he specifically recalls being called “evil Koch brother” and “greedy
and stuff.” The Eagle was speaking to Koch because he forced them to
he is launching a $200,000 campaign in Kansas to promote something
called “economic freedom,” which involves complaining about government
overreach and other things that presumably keep him from being worth $32
billion instead of $31 billion. Among Koch’s ideas for helping poor
people via a freer market is eliminating the minimum wage, which he says
will inspire impoverished people to think of innovative new ways to
create food or generate electricity as a means for trying to stay alive.

THURSDAY JULY 11

Know what makes Cincinnati conservatives
angrier than Barack Obama stealing their wallets and giving their money
to poor people? Cincinnati Public Schools wasting money trying to
educate poor kids. These folks today were probably at least mildly
angered when they saw the Enquirer headline: “More misspent
school money.” Should they have pointed and clicked, however, they would
have realized that the school wasting the shit out of taxpayer money is
actually the city’s largest private charter school, where
administrators are accused of using public funds on steakhouses,
concerts, zip line adventures, spas and Bengals crap. Despite Cincinnati
College Preparatory Academy spending more than $500,000 on such things,
the school is still set to receive $6 million in state dollars next
year because Gov. John Kasich believes this type of thing improves the
morale of private businesses, which trickles happiness and profits down
to the middle class via the jobs they create.

FRIDAY JULY 12

Most people don’t think about the country
of Finland very often — maybe recognize its flag during the Olympics or
use it as a joke about cold weather, etc. Well, today some dude who
works at The Atlantic — probably an anarchist or something —
wrote an essay about how his cousin’s family is, like, way better off
than anyone in America just because they live in Finland.

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Among the
things better in Finland than the U.S.: infant mortality rate, school
scores, poverty rate; and it’s the second-happiest country on Earth (the
U.S. doesn’t break the top 10 but only because we’re pissed about the
criteria failing to include World Series championships, of which we have
them all). Finland is apparently a self-proclaimed “welfare state,”
partially because it was the second country in the world to allow women
to vote and women were a part of parliament when the government built a
state system concerned with everyone’s needs instead of just white men
and the things they’re afraid of.

EDITOR'S NOTE: An extremely polite and NOT-AT-ALL-SARCASTIC reader pointed out that the Toronto Blue Jays won two World Series titles, in 1992 and 1993, thus America does not own them all. We'll see who's laughing when Major League Baseball moves the franchise to Las Vegas!

SATURDAY JULY 13

There are only so many ways to hurt
somebody with a tampon (see "Five Ways to Hurt Somebody with a Tampon" below), but Texas state troopers today made sure that society
would see none of them during the Texas State Senate’s vote to restrict
late-term abortions. The GOP banned any and all feminine hygiene
products from the Senate floor while it passed Republican-backed
legislation that, much like regulations in Ohio’s recently passed
budget, will pretty much ban abortions and includes a roundabout way of
defunding abortion clinics, also like in Ohio (maybe UT and OSU should
play a football game to determine which state hates women more; winner
gets to repeal the 19th Amendment). The final vote came amid protesters
inside and outside the Senate gallery, though they were unable to break
any windows or light police cars on fire because they were all out of
maxi-pads.

SUNDAY JULY 14

Laws are complicated — that’s why lawyers
have to go to special schools and judges have to get influential people
to donate to their campaigns and then convince voters that they’ll make
great decisions once they take the bench (we don’t bestow a giant black
robe and wooden hammer on just anybody). The world last week saw just
how complicated the American legal system is when George Zimmerman was
acquitted of the murder of 17-year-old black kid Trayvon Martin.
Zimmerman’s innocence was determined by an interpretation of Florida’s
terrifying self-defense laws, which state that any asshole may shoot and
kill another person even if the asshole in question started a fight and
then got his ass kicked, so long as he feared for his life. A NAACP
petition calling for a federal prosecution of Zimmerman collected more
than 200,000 signatures during the hours after the verdict, temporarily
crashing the organization’s website but likely not making many people
feel better about the possibility of being followed in the dark by a
paranoid racist who sucks at fighting but has a gun.

MONDAY JULY 15

According to the theoretical concept of
America, people who do good work are rewarded and then probably keep
working hard, thus pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and living
the dream. According to The Enquirer’s annual examination of
executive salaries, this concept is alive and well in the corporate
world, as area executives saw their compensation rise by an average of
6.6 percent last year. All was not great at the country club, however,
as several high-profile executives lost pay, including Terry Lundgren of
Macy’s (bro only got $11.3 million) and P&G CEO Bob McDonald, whose
$15.2 million was mostly awarded in stock options (how do you buy a
Range Rover with that?!?). All told, half of the 18 local CEOs who have
been in charge for two years received raises, with Vantiv’s Charles
Drucker getting the biggest one for inventing a new type of gift card
that decomposes inside a leather wallet if the purchaser forgets about
it for more than 60 days.